Ernesto Read online

  That month, Hemingway received the Order of San Cristóbal at Havana Sports Palace and made a will that gave his entire estate to Mary in the event of his death. The duty of bearing witness fell upon his staff. During the last two weeks of September, he fell ill with a kidney infection, kidney inflammation, and liver inflammation, and, bedridden, would not be able to leave his house until January.111

  Still sick in bed in November, Ernest caught wind of the news that “two wives and two husbands later,” Arnold Gingrich, his former editor, had married his old flame Jane Mason. “I can’t get over it,” the author exclaimed. “I can’t believe she married that little turd.”112 In October and November, he had been working on his African manuscript and, by the end of December 1955, had 748 pages complete.

  In November—as Castro returned to the US with Manuel Márquez to request financial support from exiles in New York, Tampa, Key West, and Miami for his revolution—Batista ran for reelection as a member of the National Progressive Coalition. Protesting the election that he believed to be rigged, former president Grau San Martín from the Authentic Party withdrew his candidacy.

  On April 4 in Cuba, Colonel Ramón Barquín López led a failed conspiracy of officers, the Conspiracy of the Pure, and was sentenced to six years on the Isle of Pines. At his court-martial, he was defended by José Miró Cardona.

  Meanwhile in Mexico, on June 24, Castro’s group of twenty-eight revolutionaries was detained when authorities discovered a stockpile of their weapons. Arguing with police and “shouting fervent Marxist-Leninist statements,” Che Guevara was kept for five weeks while his friend, Fidel, was kept for only four.113 Later, Fidel remembered that he, too, would have been released earlier had it not been for Che’s lapse of self-control. In September, an armed revolt toppled Argentina’s president Juan Perón, providing an example to the young revolutionaries. While the Castro brothers were in Mexico, their father in Cuba died.

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  In September, the Hemingways boarded the Île de France bound for Paris to travel to Spain in the middle of the month. They stayed until the end of October to attend Feria del Pilar in Saragossa.

  Leaving their drunken entourage behind them after the feria, Ernest Hemingway, feeling his internal organs rebel, heeded advice from an old friend in Madrid, Dr. Juan Manuel Madinaveitia, to reduce his alcohol to no more than six ounces of whiskey and two glasses of wine per day. As they came up from Spain, Ernest and his wife stopped off along the splendid coast for a night in Biarritz, strolled along the Charente River in Angoulême as the leaves of autumn fell and the poplar trees burned, and admired the spires of the grand gothic cathedral at Chartres as they made their way to the City of Lights. Arriving in Paris, Charles Ritz showed them to rooms 56 and 57, where they would stay in late November, throughout December, and for most of January. Due to the fighting over the Suez Canal that year, their route to Africa was closed, so they had to cancel their travel plans and spend the holidays in Paris.

  CHAPTER 12

  A North American Writer and a Cuban Revolution (1956–1959)

  On November 25, the salvaged and refurbished yacht El Granma left Tuxpan, Mexico, with a group of Cubans aboard who had received intensive revolutionary training during several months of exile. The old and decrepit boat had been built to accommodate twelve people, yet they overloaded her with eighty-two revolutionaries, two thousand gallons of gasoline, weapons, and gear, straining her till they split her hull. To distract Batista’s forces and cover Fidel’s impending landing, an underground army, wearing hand-sewn emblems on their arms and organized by Frank País (a former student-teacher), attacked police and maritime headquarters and raided weapons depots.1 When the people of Santiago de Cuba awoke, they found that the rebels had painted “M-26-7! Down with Batista!” on every block.2 In Guantánamo and Holguín, other cells of M-26-7 had staged similar attacks.

  The rebels survived their hellish sea journey of twelve hundred miles through rough seas. As Fidel Castro described it: “When the men weren’t throwing up over the side, they were bailing water out of the hull.”3 When they were spotted by a Cuban helicopter on December 2, the guerrillas urgently disembarked in a swamp. Unexpectedly, they found themselves chest-high in mud, bitten by mosquitos, pinched by crabs, and unable to cut their way through the mangroves. Cuban airplanes strafed them as they ran for cover and left weapons and supplies sinking in the muck. “It was less of a ‘landing’ and more of a ‘shipwreck,’” one of the expedition’s members recalled.4

  When they sat down to rest beside a sugarcane field at Alegría de Pío, they were ambushed—and believed they were betrayed by their guide. As Che Guevara later described with literary flair reminiscent of A Farewell to Arms, “We reached solid ground, lost, stumbling along like so many shadows or ghosts marching in response to some obscure psychic impulse. [After] seven days of constant hunger and sickness [at] sea…three still more terrible days on land…a night-long march interrupted by fainting and frequent rest periods, we reached a spot paradoxically known as Alegría de Pío.”5 Unfortunately, the spot they chose was one hundred yards from an army post.6 “Everything seemed lost,” thought Che Guevara as he lay on the ground with blood gushing out of his swelling neck after taking a bullet.7 Two weeks later, forty-two fighters had been confirmed dead and seventeen had been captured.8 On December 3, the United Press headlines announced President Batista’s successful defense of the Cuban nation and the death of the rebel leader Fidel Castro: “CUBA WIPES OUT INVADERS; LEADER IS AMONG 40 DEAD.”9

  Relieved just to find each other breathing, the survivors of the Granma expedition reassembled and reorganized in the foothills of Purial on December 18. Of the Granma expedition, only twelve remained—the Castro brothers (Fidel and Raúl), Che Guevara (who was wounded and bleeding), Camilo Cienfuegos, Juan Almeida, Efigenio Amejeiras, Ciro Redondo, Julio Díaz, Calixto García, Luis Crespo, Jose Ponce, and Universo Sanchez—so they sought cover and respite in the Sierra Maestra mountains on December 21, with just seven weapons on hand.10

  Incensed by the rebels’ flight, Batista declared “suspension of Constitutional guarantees,” giving absolute authority to police to suppress subversive activity and restore public order.11 However, the move backfired. Given free rein, soldiers and police abused their authority, forcing their way into people’s homes, interrogating suspects, torturing prisoners, extorting merchants, raping daughters, and murdering sons, such that the 26th of July Movement gained popularity and a more organized network of committed young leaders emerged.

  In January, Ambassador Gardner enlisted embassy and CIA officials to extend full support to President Batista and to Major General Diaz Tamayo, his chief of army operations. To attend to BRAC business, Batista’s defense minister, Santiago Rey, travelled to Washington that month on a McCarthyesque mission of “erasing the red scourge” as an invited guest of the US government.12

  In countries of Spanish descent, Christmas is a much-cherished holiday, and it typically lasts the two weeks from December 24 to January 6, beginning with “Nochebuena” (a traditional dinner on Christmas eve) and ending with “Reyes Magos” (Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, represented by the visit from the Magi, the three kings, or wise men, from the East). This holiday season had already begun in December. The people of eastern Cuba were decorating their houses with trees, tinsel, and presents for their families, and lighting candles in churches where caroling seeped from open windows into the cooling island breeze.13 Then, after a night of bombs, sirens, and gunfire, the people of Santiago awoke to find the bodies of sons tortured by police and scattered like rubbish along the road during what came to be known as the “Bloody Christmas Massacre.”

  During Operación Regalo de Navidad (Operation Christmas Present), Lieutenant Colonel Fermín Cowley, military commander of a regiment in Description Holguín, had given the order to execute twenty-three dissident organizers: the executions had to occur before twelve o’clock on December 24, for no o
ne was to be killed on Christmas eve. In practice, killing everyone that they had to kill in a single day proved impractical, so the assassinations carried over from December 23 to 25. Those killed were not detained or tried but dragged from their homes and murdered in front of their families on the eve of Christ’s birth.14

  While travelling on a recruitment mission in Havana, Frank País gave the order to the militants of M-26-7 to respond to the Bloody Christmas with acts of sabotage in Santiago de Cuba commencing December 30—exploding bombs between the hours of seven and eight, taking over the CMKC radio station to address the public, scattering nails to stop the flow of traffic, and disrupting the electric grid. Three boys were apprehended near a baseball field where the police suspected them of planting a bomb: William Soler Ledea, Froilán Guerra Ramírez, and Hugo Alejandro de Dios. Alejandro de Díos, age twenty, was shot trying to escape while the other two were apprehended by the police amidst frantic pleas by neighbors on their behalf. They were tortured and killed over the next three days.15

  In another part of the city, the bodies of two young Santiagueros were discovered on the side of the road: Nínive Gross Bataille, a twenty-year-old mechanic, and José de la Luz Díaz Ruiz, former sales manager of Anderson Trading Company. After dozens of young men had been murdered by the police, grieving, sadness, fury, and frustration mounted.

  After attending mass in the Dolores School chapel on the morning of Epiphany, Soler Ledea’s mother walked out of the church along with forty other women, dressed in black, and they began to march up Enramada Street in silence carrying a banner that said, “STOP THE MURDER OF OUR SONS. CUBAN MOTHERS.”16 Others spontaneously joined them until their numbers grew from forty to two hundred to eight hundred to one thousand women. Men stood on both sides of the streets in solidarity.

  When a jeep full of soldiers screeched to a stop beside the crowd and with machine guns told them to disperse, the ladies at the head of the procession held the hands of the women beside them. Her sadness within turning to despair, then to recklessness, Soler’s mother looked up, with tears welling in her eyes, at the soldier who looked so young to her and who, unlike her son, still lived: “Would you not allow me to protest the killing of my own son?”17 she said with such intensity that the soldier responded, “Go ahead, señora,” allowing the women to pass through them like water between the rocks. At the end of the procession the mothers delivered a declaration to the offices of the city newspaper, Diario de Cuba: they protested the crimes committed against their sons and demanded that they immediately stop. The “Mothers’ Protest March” produced an uncanny effect on the rest of the Cuban population, stirring sympathies and frustrations that had been long suppressed and empowering others to act. By the end of January, six disgruntled peasants had joined Fidel’s band—which had by then grown to fifteen men—making them an army of twenty-one.

  With reports of human rights violations filing the newspapers, lower-level officials in the State Department started to express concern and recommend that Batista be reined in. In February, his supporter US Secretary John Foster Dulles stifled these recommendations with the observation that doing so might be “interpreted as U.S. intervention [in] internal Cuban affairs.” But as power shifted and violence increased, covered diligently by the American press, the State Department was forced to ease back its support for the dictatorship in the middle of 1957, fearing that it might result in “serious criticism from Congress and the United States public.”18

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  Surrendering to her husband’s lust for younger women and concerned about his health and happiness, or perhaps no longer threatened by them, Mary allowed Ernest his “flirtations” more and more during the later years of their marriage, such as with the beautiful girl she had spotted for him in the gym during ocean their crossing whom Mary recommended he take to lunch “as a possible diversion.”19 When he returned from his date at Le Berkley, a fashionable restaurant in the eighth arrondissement, he was glum. “On s’ennuyait à mourrir.” (“We were bored to death.”) Wishing him farewell at her front door, she had not allowed him into her apartment after lunch. Did it matter? Wasn’t he on a “love-making diet” anyway (under doctor’s orders)? his wife asked.

  One day while they were still in Paris, Charles Ritz called Ernest over at lunch. Would the “Monsieur” be willing to take the large trunk and another small one that had been stored in the hotel’s luggage room since 1928?20 What trunks? asked Ernest, not remembering storing them but recalling a trunk made for him by Louis Vuitton. When the hotel owner had the bellboy bring them up after lunch, Ernest discovered a treasure trove of newspaper clippings, Parisian ephemera, and two stacks of notebooks of his writing inside. “The notebooks! So that’s where they were! Enfin!” exclaimed the author as he sat down afterward on the floor reading them spellbound.21

  Far from the bloodstained Christmas in revolutionary Cuba and the aggressions of the Suez Canal crisis blocking another safari in Africa, the Hemingways stayed at the Ritz for two months, aside from the week of vacation Mary took away from Ernest to see friends in London and to shop a bit beyond her means. While wifey was away, Ernest bet on the horses nearly every day at Auteuil and poured over the rediscovered “little blue and yellow Notebooks.” Mary instructed Cartier’s of London to address the bill discreetly and only to her, so when it arrived at the Ritz addressed to Ernest, and his blood pressure spiked, Mary muttered, “Those bastards!” and made amends by producing her gift, a fancy whisky flask from among the many items she had bought.22

  The two stacks of notebooks were far greater treasures than any trinket they might have picked up. Rather than risk damage to the notebooks found in the decaying trunks in the Ritz’s basement, Ernest visited the Louis Vuitton shop before his departure to buy “a battery of luggage big and varied enough for a troupe of chorus girls.”23 On January 22, they loaded thirty-three pieces of luggage on the Île de France before departure across the Atlantic.

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  By 1954, Ernest had sustained five major concussions—at least—the last one, produced by head-butting the door of a burning airplane to save his and Mary’s life, had caused cerebrospinal fluid to leak out of his ear.24 Complaining frequently in his letters of memory loss and frequent headaches during the last seven years of his life, Ernest Hemingway was a doctor’s son who regularly consulted several physicians; he knew what was happening as he suffered from post-concussive syndrome (exacerbated by his alcoholism, hypertension, and diabetes).25 It became increasingly difficult for him to manage the manic-depression apparently prevalent in his family, and the mood swings he had reined in during most of his life through sheer guts. In the last years, his temper became increasingly unstable.

  Luckily, the notebooks linked him to the past. The younger Hemingway was now in direct communication with the aging man. God-damnit if the notebooks did not show him what he loved, what he could do, the “hunger” of Paris—the mojo that defined him.

  Taking better care of himself, Ernest was sleeping better, and his blood pressure was down. During their return trip on the Île de France, he befriended the ship’s doctor, Dr. Jean Monnier, who had been treating him successfully by prescribing him remedies for his varied illnesses. Though he missed “Black Dog” who had passed a way while he was gone, Ernest looked enthused as he spent mornings organizing piles of papers from Paris on his library floor and picking through them as he matched them with the memories they awakened.26

  In the mid-1950s, Leopoldina Rodríguez had also been suffering as she got on in age and was diagnosed with cancer. Throughout her terminal illness, Hemingway had been paying her hospital bills.27 In 1956, Leopoldina died in that same Calle Infanta apartment that Hemingway had rented for her all those years. Her niece Ilse Bulit remembers the way Leopoldina would look at her—a young, plain-looking mulatto girl wearing thick glasses—and tell her that her intelligence was her only way to escape poverty. Leopoldina frequently gave her money for her stud
ies, money that may have come from Hemingway. Ilse also remembers that, in her awkward adolescence, she harbored an aversion to Hemingway for his constant sweating, his odor of alcohol, his frequent failure to acknowledge her grandmother, Maria Ignacía Pedroso, when they saw him in public, and for an occasion when he slammed the door in Ilse’s face so that he could be alone with her aunt. But recalls Ilse, Leopoldina’s illness brought Hemingway much closer to their family, and particularly to Leopoldina’s mother.28

  When Leopoldina passed away that summer, Hemingway paid for and attended her funeral. “A solitary man who accompanied her remains to the cemetery paid for her funeral,” wrote Cuban biographer Norberto Fuentes in the 1980s. “He was gray haired and bearded, an American wearing a short-sleeved guayabera, large moccasins and a pair of very wide baggy pants.”29 Bulit suggests that witnessing the senseless suffering of friends like Leopoldina and finally losing them may have contributed in part to Hemingway’s own feelings of hopelessness and possibly his 1961 suicide.30 One afternoon after making love, they had argued about the authenticity of his protagonist, and the old man’s dreams, and she had screamed at him that he had no idea what it was truly like to come face-to-face with his own mortality. Now, Leopoldina was gone.